


Love Sick

by glaciya



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Bruce Ships It, Fluff, M/M, Oblivious Jason Todd, Oblivious Tim Drake, Rom-Com vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:02:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26818534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glaciya/pseuds/glaciya
Summary: Tim opens his mouth to reply but it turns into a frown as he checks Jason over. “I think some of the hearts moved around.”“Oh yeah. Bruce noticed they were faded earlier.” Jason shrugs, but when he looks down at himself again and finds that not only are the hearts red again, but there are more of them, spreading down his chest to cover his pecs. There’s even a bright red heart around his left nipple.“Look at this!” He grabs his tit with one hand and points toward the nipple that’s causing his dismay with the other.Tim coughs and says, “I am looking,” but when Jason shoots him a helpless look he’s already turning back to his tray, gathering their cups and muttering something about needing to do the dishes.---In which Jason visibly pines and Tim thirsts.
Relationships: Tim Drake/Jason Todd
Comments: 42
Kudos: 452





	Love Sick

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all <3 so this was a prompt from twitter for Jason sprouting hearts all over his skin whenever he's around Tim. It's based on a comic called Dear Signal.

“Are you feeling any nausea?”

“No.”

“Dizziness?”

“Nope.”

“Hot flashes?”   


“No.”

“What about-”

“Tim I’m telling you I feel fine.” Jason sighs, sitting up on the examination table. “Maybe it was just a fluke?”

“One of Poison Ivy’s plants sprayed you with venom and you think it was a fluke?” Tim casts another glance at the results of Jason’s blood test displayed on his computer screen as if both of them somehow missed something. “I’d almost rather you had symptoms so we could figure out how to treat you.”

“Maybe the universe decided to give me a break for once,” Jason says, raising his arms above his head to stretch. He must have been lying there for at least an hour waiting for Tim to finish running all his tests and he’s more than a little stiff now. He pretends he doesn’t notice Tim’s eyes on him as he brings his arms behind his back and clasps his hands together, holding it there to stretch his upper back and chest. He’s probably checking for any signs of a reaction from whatever the plant sprayed him with for what has to be the tenth time. 

“Hey, at least it wasn’t that creepy love potion thing she does sometimes, then you’d have to deal with me being all handsy and making heart eyes at you,” he jokes. 

“Oh, yes. What a hassle that would be,” Tim mutters and turns back to the computer to shut it off. 

Jason chuckles and hops off the examination table, shivering when his feet touch the cool tile. “You don’t happen to have any clothes I can borrow do you?” he asks. The clothes he came here in are currently covered in green slime and sitting in a red biohazard bag in the corner of Tim’s lab. “I can wash them tonight and bring them back to you tomorrow.”

“I’d actually rather you stay here for the night if that’s okay with you,” Tim says. “I don’t think you should be alone tonight, just in case, and I’d worry less if I could keep an eye on you myself.” 

Jason scratches idly at his palm, frowning at both Tim’s worry and the odd, light feeling in his chest at hearing him admit to it. “I guess I don’t have anywhere I need to be.”

Tim brightens. “Good! I have some old clothes Connor left over that I think should fit you.”

“Connor?” Jason trails after him as Tim leads them to the elevator out of Tim’s underground Nest and into the living area of the apartment complex he’d bought out. It’s a nice set up he has, though he needs to work on the heating system before winter. Jason had felt the chill before he stripped and is feeling it especially now. It’s worse than the Batcave in here. 

“Kent,” Tim clarifies as he presses the button for the first floor. He frowns a bit as the elevator doors start to slide shut. “Or I guess you’d know him as Superboy. He’s on my team.”

“I know who he is,” Jason says and forces himself to relax when he catches himself bowing up in the reflection on the elevator doors. “I didn’t know if you had his clothes because he had been staying the night with you or  _ staying the night. _ ” 

He tries to keep his tone light and teasing but thinks he might not have succeeded completely when Tim’s sharp eyes catch his in their reflections and narrow. “Does it matter?” 

Jason shrugs, shivering and crossing his arms over his chest to keep warm. “Guess not,” he lies. “I’m just curious. You don’t have to tell me.”

Tim rolls his eyes, the searching look on his face disappearing as the elevator doors slide open to reveal his apartment. “He drops me off here sometimes when we’ve had a late night with the team and I need to be in Gotham the next morning. Sometimes he stays the night, as a friend.” 

“Oh. That’s cool.” 

“Is it?’” Tim asks, shooting him a smile. He continues to the bedroom before Jason has a chance to figure out how to respond. “Come on, I’m pretty sure I left his clothes in my clean clothes bin.”

Jason snorts. “You would have clean clothes in a bin instead of putting them up where they belong.”

“We can’t all be perfect and have our clothes put up color coded like you, Jay.”

“They’re not color coded. They’re organized based on what weather I’d wear them in. There’s a difference.”

Tim’s laugh carries with them into the bedroom.

He finds a comfortable outfit for Jason to sleep in and Jason only preens a little bit when he finds Connor’s shirt and sweatpants tight around his chest and thighs. The only problem with that is when he tries raising his arms above his head at all he flashes a lot of his stomach. 

“Do you have an extra blanket I can borrow?” he asks, thinking of the chill that had followed them from the basement as he tugs the shirt down to cover his exposed stomach. 

“You should sleep with me,” Tim says suddenly and when Jason looks up at him in surprise he’s watching Jason wrestle with his shirt. “In my bed.”

Jason raises his eyebrows wordlessly and Tim clears his throat, cheeks going red. “It’s a King. It’s plenty big enough for us to sleep in.”

Jason feels hot and itchy all over and bites at his lip to keep himself from saying yes too eagerly. “Uh…"

“You don’t have to,” Tim says, calm and casual. “Connor sleeps with me when he stays over so-”

“I don’t mind,” Jason hurries to say. “I’ve been told I hog the covers though.”

“I tend to get too hot at night and kick the covers off anyway.” Tim smiles at him. “Looks like we’re good for each other.”

* * *

Tim snores in his sleep. It feels too intimate that Jason should know that about him. He thinks that’s what woke him up in what has to be the early hours of the morning, the presence of a body lying much closer to him than the opposite sides they had started out on, and Tim’s soft snores close to his ear. 

True to his word Tim must have kicked the covers off himself sometime in the night and Jason unconsciously took them for himself. Though the heat must have kicked on at some point because Jason feels hot and sweaty in the blanket burrito he’s formed around himself. He shucks the covers off his torso at least, leaving them around his feet since they’re always cold no matter what the temperature of the rest of his body is. 

The movement must disturb Tim in his sleep because he starts mumbling and frowning, not fully awake but definitely not happy. Jason smiles as he watches him and reaches out to try and soothe the wrinkle in between Tim’s eyebrows when he spots the mark on his wrist.

Marks, he realizes as he blinks the sleep away from his eyes. Several of them are spattered all over his hand and continuing up his forearm. He’s confused for the few moments it takes him to remember the slime Ivy dosed him in last night and then he’s sitting up in a hurry and scrambling for the wall lamp beside the bed.

The light flickers on, making Jason squint and Tim give another unhappy, sleepy moan. Jason can’t really spare much time for Tim’s comfort though because his eyes are finally adjusting to the light and he can see there are marks all over every inch of his exposed skin. 

He can feel Tim shuffling around beside him as he grabs his shirt and yanks it over his head. 

“ _ Good morn _ -oh.” Tim sits up quickly. “Are those hearts?”

“Looks like it,” Jason murmurs, staring with growing horror at the countless red hearts covering him. He looks like a freakin’ Valentine's Day ad. 

Tim grabs Jason’s shoulders and pulls him closer, lips pursing as he gives Jason a once over. “Do they itch or hurt at all?”

“No.” Jason runs his thumb over a particularly small one on the middle knuckle of his index finger. The skin doesn’t feel raised around it either. If he wasn’t able to see them Jason would have no idea they were there. 

“I think…” Tim worries his bottom lip. “I think I’m in over my head a little here.”

“Don’t say it,” Jason growls, already knowing what Tim’s going to say. 

Tim shoots him an apologetic look but he still says, “We need to call Bruce.”

Jason sighs. “Fuck.”

* * *

Bruce’s first reaction to Jason’s predicament is to lecture him. He lectures him!

“I could be dying,” Jason reminds him when Bruce finally takes a breath. 

“You’re not dying,” Bruce says, but Jason doesn’t miss the way his eyes flick toward the results still displayed on Tim’s computer screen. Tim had disappeared not long after Bruce had got there, claiming he was going to make coffee. That had been twenty minutes ago. The traitor. “It still wasn’t smart to go head to head with Ivy without any backup.”

“It’s not like I started my night planning to fight her. You know how it is,” Jason grumbles, trying and failing not to sound like a scolded child. 

“I do,” Bruce’s expression softens. “It’s good that it wasn’t anything more harmful and you only have to deal with your- decorations.”

Decorations. Jason’s chuckles, looking down at his arms again. “Oh. Huh.”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing just-” Jason holds his arm up, inspecting it in a better light. “I think the hearts are lighter than they were this morning.”

Bruce comes closer to him, following Jason’s gaze to his arms. “There aren’t as many on your arms as there were when I first came here either.”

“They do look more spaced out now,” Jason says. The heart on his palm he’d first noticed when he woke up is completely gone and the heart he’d found on his index finger is a pale pink shade instead of the bright red it was earlier. “Maybe it’s wearing off?”

“Maybe. I’d still like to talk with Ivy to figure out what she planned with this.” 

“Talk?” Jason raises his brows.

“She can be reasoned with when she feels that it’s in her best interest.” Bruce gives him his Batman smile, all teeth and threat. “I’ll make sure she knows it’s in her best interest.”

The elevator door gives a quiet ding before sliding open to reveal a harried looking Tim carrying a tray with three mugs on it. “Sorry!” he calls, hurrying over to them. “Someone from work called wondering why I missed my meeting this morning.”

“I didn’t realize you were scheduled in the office today,” Bruce says, taking a cup of coffee from the tray. “Why didn’t you go in? I could have handled this.”

Jason rolls his eyes, knowing Bruce’s ‘this’ was referring to him. He grabs one of the mugs and takes a drink from it to avoid making a comment on that. He plans on playing nice until he’s sure whatever Ivy used on him is out of his system. Hopefully that won’t be much longer now. 

Tim frowns. “I wanted to make sure Jason was okay.”

Jason feels himself heat up in a way he knows isn’t entirely caused by the drink in his hand. Tim is _worried_ about him. 

“Alright,” Bruce says in a curiously neutral tone. “You can stay here with him while I interrogate Ivy.” 

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Jason says, sitting his cup back on Tim’s tray. When he looks back at where Bruce was standing he’s nowhere in sight. “How does he do that?”

Tim shakes his head, sitting the tray down on the computer desk, much closer to all his expensive electronics than Jason would have put it. “I like to picture him sprinting away as fast as he can as soon as no ones looking.”

Jason snorts. “He’d have to sprint stealthily though, otherwise we’d just hear him running off.”

“Like a villain in a cartoon?” Tim asks, laughing. It’s a good look for him. 

“Yeah but at about five times that speed.” 

“Now I’m imagining him doing that weird tiptoe walk cartoon bad guys do when they’re being sneaky. I’ll never be able to take him seriously again.”

“He dresses up like a tiny mammal and says things like,  _ ‘I am vengeance’ _ all the time. He shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Tim opens his mouth to reply but it turns into a frown as he checks Jason over. “I think some of the hearts moved around.”

“Oh yeah. Bruce noticed they were faded earlier.” Jason shrugs, but when he looks down at himself again and finds that. not only are the hearts red again, but there are  _ more _ of them, spreading down his chest to cover his pecs. There’s even a bright red heart around his left nipple.

“Look at this!” He grabs his tit with one hand and points toward the nipple that’s causing his dismay with the other. 

Tim coughs and says, “I am looking,” but when Jason shoots him a helpless look he’s already turning back to his tray, gathering their cups and muttering something about needing to do the dishes. 

* * *

At Tim’s request- not Bruce’s- Jason stays with Tim while they wait for Bruce to finish interrogating Ivy. Tim leaves him be for the most part, other than coming to check up on him every now and then, he stays in his home office doing work for Wayne Enterprises despite him taking the day off. 

Jason lounges in Tim’s ridiculously large living room and watches reality shows on his ridiculously large television and tries to relax, an act that’s much easier in theory than in practice. It feels strange to depend on Bruce again, strange that he feels confident and safe waiting in Tim’s care. Strange that the strangeness of it doesn’t scare him. 

“Your hearts faded again,” Tim says, drawing Jason out of his thoughts. 

Jason looks away from the screen to find Tim leaning against the doorframe watching him with an unreadable expression on his face. He’s pulled half of his hair back since the last time he checked on Jason into a messy bun with a pen twisted in it. 

He’s adorable. Jason tucks the thought away as soon as it comes to him and locks in up where only he knows it exists. “They faded during the last episode. I guess watching other people work through love triangles and bitter rivalries was the cure all along,”

“If that helps you should watch the episode where the youngest son finds out his real father was his tennis coach the entire time,” Tim says coming over to sit on the couch next to Jason. “Hey, that one is new.”

Tim leans down and brushes his finger against the new heart that formed around Jason’s belly button before Jason has time to brace for it and he sucks in a sharp breath as his belly quivers at the lightest touch. 

Tim, of course, notices. “Jason, are you ticklish?”

“No.”

“Really?” Tim’s hand twitches back toward him and Jason can’t help the way his stomach clenches.

Jason sighs and Tim smiles. 

* * *

When Bruce calls sometime later, Tim’s living room is destroyed. The couch is turned over on its back and the cushions are thrown about randomly from where they had been used as weapons by either Tim or Jason at one point. 

Jason has Tim pinned to the floor and is mercilessly running his hands up and down Tim’s ribcage so that when his phone starts to ring it takes them a few moments to hear it over Tim’s squeals. 

“That’s Bruce,” Tim gasps. “I have to get it.”

“Uh huh. Sure,” Jason teases as he gets off Tim. He tries to hide how out of breath he is. Tim is _ wily _ . 

Tim answers the call and connects it to the television as Jason starts to put the couch back together so they can have somewhere to sit, shaking his head when he notices the deep red hearts that are covering his hands, arms, and stomach. He hopes Bruce has good news for them. 

Jason and Tim both drop down onto the couch as Bruce’s face appears on the television screen. Jason doesn’t realize he’s bouncing his leg until Tim presses into Jason’s side with a little pressure, just enough to confirm that Tim is there for him. Jason ignores Bruce long enough to shoot a grateful smile at Tim and gets a smile in return. 

Bruce nods at them in greeting when they turn to face him. “I found Ivy at the botanical garden. She was surprisingly cooperative.”

“Well?” Tim prompts, sounding impatient. He’s worried again, Jason realizes, rubbing a particularly small heart that appeared in his inner elbow. 

“She said her plants made the pollen on their own as a prank for her. It was made for Harley, so it’s harmless. She said the hearts are supposed to be a reaction to a certain stimulant.” Bruce clears his throat and looks away at something off screen.

“It’s Tim, isn’t?” Jason asks and when Bruce and Tim both look at him sharply he adds, “I noticed earlier that they only appear when I’m around Tim or thinking of him and they start to fade whenever we’re separated.”

“Huh,” Tim says while Bruce just stares at them. “A bunch of them popped up during our tickle fight. I wonder if it has something to do with me being the first person you came into contact with after the run in with Ivy.”

“Tickle fight?” Bruce asks, a strange pinched expression on his face.

“Yeah we were-” Tim laughs and waves a hand. “Never mind. Did she say when it would get out of his system?”

Bruce’s eyes flicker back and forth between the two of them for a moment before he says, “Ivy said the hearts should disappear completely within seventy-two hours. I’d recommend Jason stays there with you that way you can watch over him until he’s clear.”

“I have a few things to do for work but-”

“Email them to me. I can handle them while you focus on Jason,” Bruce interrupts him before he can finish.

“Cool,” Tim says before turning to Jason. “Are you okay staying here?”

Jason shrugs. “I have nothing else to do,” he repeats. It’s not necessarily as true of a statement as it was yesterday, but he’s not very eager to leave Tim. 

Bruce grunts in what Jason assumes is agreement before he ends the call without saying goodbye. 

“Did he seem strange to you?” Jason asks. 

“No more than usual. Maybe Ivy gave him more trouble than he let on.”

“Maybe,” Jason inspects the hearts on his arms again. “At least I know when these will stop popping up.”

“Yeah that’s too bad, They’re pretty cute,” Tim says, grinning at him. “Oh! Another one just appeared on your cheek.”

**Author's Note:**

> Next time Bruce gets Jason alone he informs him that the hearts only appear when you're around someone you're in love with :')
> 
> Thanks for reading! If you liked this, feel free to leave a comment and/or a kudos!  
> You can also find me screaming about fandom stuff at  
> [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/glaciya) and [Twitter!](https://twitter.com/glaciiya)


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